The Enviro-Skeptic Movement

During the late 80s and much of the 90s, it was fashionable to be green – to the extent that it became a celebrity movement and environmentalist political parties started making big breakthroughs worldwide. Recently, it has become fashionable to reject the green message, and claim that the threat to our planet is grossly exaggerated. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the climate change debate. While environmentalists consider climate change to be man-made, a serious threat and preventable, it is now almost equally common to hear people refer to it as a “swindle”.

Although the initial target of the skeptics has been climate change, the overall skeptic movement has now become wider, and is equally capable of diminishing the importance of pollution and deforestation. For the world to progress, they argue, it is important to make sacrifices, and while it is nice to have areas of natural beauty and a thriving ecosystem, some compromises are necessary when it comes to our environment. By dubbing the environmental movement as reactionaries and regressive, they create a situation where people are reluctant to speak out.

It should not be ignored that many of the “scientific” studies that diminish the effect of deforestation have been commissioned and funded by the very businesses who stand to gain most by the continuing plunder of our natural resources. Their short-termist attitude to the environment is financially supported by the fact that once the money is banked, it will take years for the real toll on the environment to be obvious to all. In this light, it has to be accepted that being called a “nutjob” is a small price to pay for the health of our planet and our people in years to come.